The map below is your entry.

Bernstein writes in the introduction to the book:

"...I was thinking about a particular trip, one that I had had in mind for a long time but for a variety of reasons (soon to be disclosed) had never undertaken. It was a sort of pilgrimage overland from China to India and back along the route of a Chinese Buddhist monk who went that way in the seventh century in search of the Truth... The monk's name was Hsuan Tsang, and I think of him as the greatest traveler in history. He is far from a household name in the West, but he is certainly one in the East; in China and India he has had both historic and mythic standing for many centuries. I learned about him a long time ago, so long ago in fact that I don't remember exactly when, but no doubt at some point during the period in my life when I was what is rather grandly called a China expert...

"I sent my passport to Hong Kong and got a visa to China through my usual travel agent there. My employers at the Times gave me just enough time off to complete the journey. I bought a cheap, nonrefundable round-trip ticket to Hong Kong. I had a six-hour layover there, during which time I bought a one-way ticket on China Northwest Airlines direct to Xian, Hsuan Tsang's starting point. At the last minute, and to my great joy, my wife Zhongmei decided to travel with me for the first Chinese leg of the journey. She wanted to be in Xian to attempt to run interference for me if I ran into trouble with the Chinese bureaucracy. She would fly into China ahead of me and would meet me at the airport after passport control. It was an offer of amazing, eye-opening generosity, an act of love.

"The plane from Hong Kong was nicer, newer, more up to international standards than Chinese planes in the days when I lived in Beijing as a journalist. But it still had something about it--a certain stiff formality among the service personnel, the solemnity of the Communist bureaucrats who were my traveling companions--that made me sense I was entering a different world. Going to China was always entering a different world. We took off, and I saw the glistening ribbon of the Pearl River below, and Guangdong Province, a darkening green in the twilight. It had been twenty-seven years since I made my first trip to China in the days when you had to walk across the bridge at Lowu between China and Hong Kong and you went through passport control in a kind of farm shed placed within earshot of a commune pigsty. A lot had changed, most conspicuously the heralded opening of China to the outside world. Whether China would be open to me was what I would find out in just a few hours..."

You can READ THE FULL INTRODUCTION to Ultimate Journey.

To begin your photo tour, click on the beginning of the voyage, the city of Xian in northeast China, above Hong Kong.

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